Eve of Janus Debutante Ball

Tiana Clark

Winter 2017

Past the portrait of Robert E. Lee I walkedinto the snow bright circle of center stage. Half my facecaught in the blazing light and the other lostin my shadow growing against the wall, looking backon Belle Meade Plantation, at the kitchen’sdirty dishes stacked like cairns for my kin, looking forward

into a rich blizzard—the wealthy haze of glittering tables,clinking china, and a flurry of whispers. Old Money lookedme up and down and back again, placing and tracing my origin.All evening, they kept asking me who made my dress,to repeat my last name. Knight, I said. Knight, as in blackas the night sky above, everywhere stabbed by blinking stars.

I flew to Rio de Janeiro on a red-eye, having shared my brain all night with the writer Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, whose novel Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (better known in English as Epitaph of a Small Winner) I’d read between snoozes. I was in Brazil to cheer on my sister, Sarah, competing in the Olympic Games in triathlon.

The Cost of Living is an unfettered, honest look into Levy’s life and how she refuses to reduce herself in the face of turmoil: “Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.”